It happened again
It happened just like it always happens and I’ve finally had to admit defeat. I’ve finally come to the conclusion that resistance is indeed futile and there’s no sense any longer in fighting it. I’m simply at that point in life where battling my own nature is a useless endeavor. I mean hell…I’m not in my 20’s anymore now am I? I don’t have the energy to resist any longer.
And so the geek wins in the end.
It was Linux that did me in. Ubuntu Linux to be specific. The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. You see, a very few weeks ago I finally gave Windows the boot, backed up my stuff, dragged Windows off my hard drive entirely and shoved it out the door and good riddance. Since then, me and my inner geek have been having a love affair with Ubuntu.
I’m not going to get into all the dirty details of this sordid affair but one thing I will say about it is that it was entirely too easy meaning that the damn OS just installed, updated itself and ran—that’s it. Needed bits, pieces and the proper codecs (all free of charge) were easily found, added and all was said and done in a little over two hours. Beats the hell out of two days for reloading Windows, updating same and reloading all my software.
One thing was missing though. Just one. The single item that Ubuntu simply could not handle even with a good dose of Wine in it’s belly was my all time favorite blog editor; Windows Live Writer. And there wasn’t anything even close to WLW for Linux anywhere to be found.
So I opened the door, grabbed Windows by the collar (it was still whimpering on the doorstep) and dragged it back into the kitchen. I gave it a cup of coffee and a bit of breakfast then told it that if it behaved I’d let him back onto my computer—but it would have to live in a box. A virtual box to be specific.
Windows had no problem with that. Beat the heck out the doorstep at any rate.
So off to the Package Manager I went (Windows’ “Add/Remove Programs” on steroids), installed VirtualBox OSE, created a virtual box for XP to live in, and loaded it up—too easy. Then I wasted way too much time dinking around with getting a shared folder to work (my brain simply stopped working for some reason at that point when it came to something called “guest additions” and where these additions were supposed to live) and my banished Windows had it’s reprieve.
Now I’m happily typing up this post in Windows Live Writer once again. Funny thing is that Windows XP runs 5 times better and twice as fast in it’s virtual box then it ever did as a live OS. I’ve got this 5 year old machine with a single core AMD processor, a measly 1Gb of memory and the processor is barely ticking over at 12% and over half the physical memory is free.
And the inner geek dances for joy.
I won’t be boring the crap out of everyone with “all things Linux”, not here anyway. Probably not anywhere for that matter but I thought it might be appropriate to explain where I’ve been of late. The geek simply overwhelmed me and wasn’t going to let me go until it was satisfied.
So now that I’ve hoisted the white flag and the end of the long battle with the geek has finally come to an end, if I disappear for several days now and then, you’ll know where I am.
The geek has dragged me off on yet another adventure. And who knows where it might lead?
